Customer satisfaction is critically important to a software company's success. Often, patches are deployed to correct problems with software. In some cases, the patches are sent to just a few parties to test the patches but these patches would not be automatically installed and the deployment of these fixes required tedious, manual work from customers contributing to dissatisfaction. For example, in the past, a customer would call product support reporting an issue and request a fix for the issue. Product support would work with a developer to get a private fix created. For the developer, making the private fix required making a source code change in the source tree, compiling the source into binaries, and putting those raw binaries on a share for the product support engineer to share with the customer. The customer would then follow hand-prepared instructions from product support to put the fix onto their affected machines. The new binaries would be manually copied to the location specified by the software manufacturer. The machines would then be rebooted to start running with the fixes. Next, the customer would confirm these fixes work on the machine, and would be asked to clean up these old binaries by rebooting again in safe mode and restoring the original files, then doing a final reboot to start up normally again. The customer would then communicate the results of their test to the software manufacturer.
The process above has many pain points including:                Developer pain delivering multiple binaries in their fix;        Customer pain from extra reboots during deployment;        Customer pain deploying multiple files to single machine;        Customer pain deploying a fix to multiple machines;        Customer pain manually removing files after testing;        Customer pain manually confirming fixes removed after testing;        Customer pain from downtime due to length of process;        Product Support pain communicating what/how to deploy; and        Customer & Product Support pain identifying machines with private fixes.        